Center on Narrative, Disinformation and Strategic Influence

The tumult of 2020 put into stark relief civil society’s dependence on credible information for maintaining stability. Widespread misinformation about public health measures hampered unified, collective action to mitigate the effects of COVID-19; severe political polarization was exacerbated by disinformation campaigns designed to dismay audiences, distort situations and distract from actual malfeasance. These campaigns also erode faith that anything is knowable and true — a boon to autocrats and a threat to democratic values. Building on a robust portfolio of existing projects, GSI has established a new center to engage with the complex nature of influence and disinformation.

The Center on Narrative, Disinformation and Strategic Influence (NDSI) conducts timely, critical research that fuses the humanities and social sciences with state-of-the-art computer science and modeling in order to develop better insights into how information influences human behavior and geopolitics.

The center provides evidence-based, mission-relevant insights and tools, benefiting national defense and other stakeholders and their efforts to safeguard the United States, its allies, and democratic principles.

Scott Ruston in discussion with student in 2019

Capabilities:

• Narrative analysis • Information and influence operations signal detection and analysis • Media literacy • Disinformation detection

Project highlights:

Detecting and tracking adversarial framing

Developing the ability to automatically detect adversarial framing — when parties hostile to U.S. interest frame events in the media to justify support for future actions — as it occurs and studying how that framing transitions from known propaganda to nonpropaganda sources.

Analyzing disinformation and propaganda tactics

Providing policymakers with a fuller understanding of the adversarial communication landscape in Latvia, Sweden and the United Kingdom. The team identified adversarial framing around contentious issues, trained a machine classifier to detect such framing at scale, revealed shifts in messaging strategies and analyzed antidemocracy narratives.

Semantic information defender

As part of a larger team performing on a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program, NDSI is helping develop a system that detects, characterizes and attributes misinformation and disinformation — whether image, video, audio or text. NDSI provides content and narrative analysis, media industry expertise, text detection and characterization methods, and a large dataset of known disinformation and manipulated media objects to the project.

The power of deceptive memes and falsified videos to influence and polarize is partly determined by unique aspects of human cognition, understanding and identity. We need an interdisciplinary approach that fuses humanities, social science and computer science to defend against disinformation and malign influence.

Scott Ruston, director, Center on Narrative, Disinformation and Strategic Influence